[HN Gopher] Fairphone 4 is coming to the US
___________________________________________________________________
Fairphone 4 is coming to the US
Author : raybb
Score : 198 points
Date : 2023-07-09 10:18 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| al1r4d wrote:
| I hope available on Indonesia
| putlake wrote:
| The US already has a repairable, sustainable smartphone. It's
| called Teracube. https://myteracube.com/
|
| 4-yr warranty, stock Android.
| itsacomment wrote:
| I wasn't able to tell from a quick scroll over the homepage,
| but while they fix instead of replacing, teracube don't seem to
| include fairly sourced resources, which are a pretty big sales
| point for fairphone
| KnobbleMcKnees wrote:
| I was glad to see on arriving at their homepage that the
| Teracube was not, in fact, a cube.
| martin_a wrote:
| Opening that website greets me with an alert() with the
| message: error; [object Object]
|
| If their phones do work as good as that... Well...
| miduil wrote:
| I really wish Fairphone 4 had GrapheneOS support, but after
| almost 4 years of Fairphone 3 I decided to go with a Pixel
| instead. Too many hardware bugs with the FP3 that were never
| acknowledged by the vendor and unhappy customers with bricked
| FP4's that requires sending them back in.
|
| Also I would have hoped for them continuing the FP3 architecture,
| feels such a waste that they've now instead developed a much more
| expensive hardware again.
|
| Building and maintaining an Android device is truly not trivial,
| kudos for that, but I don't think with their current company size
| they're truly up for the task.
|
| Also buying a Fairphone instead of a wider used phone means
| you'll be able to repair it - but because all the internal parts
| are super customized, phone repair shops won't have their usual
| source of spare parts.
| pSYoniK wrote:
| A thousand tims this. When I moved away from stock Android and
| on to cuwtom ROMs a few years ago, I didnt find anything that
| met my needs but then I stumbled on GrapheneOS. I understand
| why it doesn't run on non Pixels but their approach to handling
| Google Services and preinstalled software in particulqr should
| really be copied by other ROM maintainers and developers
| (something I'll give a shot in a few short months).
|
| My only gripe now on my 2nd Pixel with Graphene is exactly what
| Fairphone is fixing, which is easy hardware maintenance + 3.5mm
| jack. I guess a modular/repairable smartphone with w non-
| invasive os is "the dream".
| yesbabyyes wrote:
| > My only gripe now on my 2nd Pixel with Graphene is exactly
| what Fairphone is fixing, which is easy hardware maintenance
| + 3.5mm jack.
|
| The hardware maintenance is true (even though I suspect the
| repairability of the usb-c port is what made me need to
| replace it in the first place) but starting with the 4,
| Fairphone doesn't have a 3.5 mm jack.
|
| Source: I have a Fairphone 4 and have so far replaced the
| screen, battery, usb-c port and back cover.
| Kiro wrote:
| > their approach to handling Google Services and preinstalled
| software in particulqr should really be copied
|
| How does it work on Graphene?
| miduil wrote:
| You can find out a high level explanation here:
| https://grapheneos.org/usage#sandboxed-google-play
| cauch wrote:
| > Too many hardware bugs with the FP3 that were never
| acknowledged by the vendor
|
| I have a FP3, and it has been my first and only Android
| smartphone. I now wonder if what I've experienced is the
| "normal Android experience" or if I would have experienced
| something different from another brand.
|
| I'm also avoiding / disabling Google stuffs (I'm using f-droid,
| ...). I was occasionally surprised to see how a lot of people
| are flooded with ads / unsolicited messages and seemed not to
| care. I don't get it, though, it looks such an awful
| experience.
|
| The main thing I've noticed is the long time it sometimes take
| for the picture-taking app to get on focus. But I thought it
| was due to the standard Android software.
|
| Is there a place to list the FP3 bugs?
| miduil wrote:
| * Easily damaged by moisture (even though they've claimed
| certain IP ratings), due to the printed conductor inside the
| plastic layers with pin connectors
|
| * Battery swelling after less than two years of operation (no
| way to source this battery locally since they've built a
| custom connector / redesigned an standard OEM battery)
|
| * Overheating
|
| * Touch screen glitches (they've resolved that after a year
| via software, support was super unhelpful with that problem)
|
| * Wi-Fi 5 GHz broken/unreliable for many people
|
| * Camera focus (not sure if FP3+ improved on that front)
|
| * Broken fingerprint sensor (from the beginning, most common
| issue) and by broken I mean not functional at all
|
| * self-disintegrating plastic parts (back and side covers),
| likely due to the fact they are using recycled plastic -
| they've changed the plastic chemistry with FP3+, for me the
| plastic became more and more brittle
|
| -
|
| In addition for me with software:
|
| * charging LED can't be disabled, which is extremely bright
| when you're sleeping - community members shrugging this off
| with "you shouldn't use your phone in your bedroom anyway"
|
| * screen brightness too bright / unreliable brightness sensor
| readings (they had several updates because it was so hard to
| tweak for them)
|
| On the positive end:
|
| Phone is quite durable, fell down on many occasions and
| because of it's plastic/design openness the battery falls out
| but screen never broke in bunch of occasions.
|
| Edit: Formatting
| progval wrote:
| I bought a FP3+ a year ago and run it with LineageOS (with
| microG). I don't have any of the issues you list except for
| LED and brightness. However I do have random troubles with
| location, but that's probably due to being de-googled.
|
| Regarding WiFi, did you try disabling the "battery
| optimizer"?
| justtocomment wrote:
| I see a lot of people mentioning Fairphones not being on
| par with phones by multi billion dollar companies.
|
| This citicism is valid. But I think it leaves out a lot of
| the overall picture.
|
| I have a Fairphone 3, and so far it survived being dropped
| into the bathtub (being submerged for a sec), being dropped
| on hard floors several times and being stepped on (screen
| got cracked, but it still works).
|
| Like with the Fairphone 2 I had before that, I'm able to do
| repairs (part replacements) on my own with minimal effort.
| It gets support for years.
|
| I have it running /e/ OS (terrible name) without Google
| Services and while that's not Graphene OS, I vastly prefer
| it to Google Android.
|
| For me having minor frustrations with Wi-Fi is well worth
| having a less-unfree and more-ethical phone.
| verall wrote:
| The camera focus problem is not a an android problem it's
| just a fairphone problem. OEMs typically write their own
| camera apps.
| nilespotter wrote:
| CalyxOS supports it - https://calyxos.org/docs/guide/device-
| support/
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| I wished there was a Graphene/Lineage OS phone (OEM supported;
| not "flash it yourself" sorcery needed kinda thing).
|
| And something within the size of original iPhone SE or Mini
| with just even an above average battery. I'd pay a premium for
| that phone. It's my wishful thinking about smartphones.
| philistine wrote:
| Android has always had bigger phones than Apple. At this
| point it's in the DNA of the platform to offer phones above
| 5.5 inches.
| pmontra wrote:
| I'm with you for a smaller phone. A Sony Xperia X Compact
| with no bezel would be great
| https://gsmarena.com/sony_xperia_x_compact-8292.php
|
| And the lightness!
| brnaftr361 wrote:
| I had an XZ1c and, despite the bezels, I still prefer it to
| the Zenfone 8 that succeeded it. Unfortunately my carrier
| forced me to "upgrade" otherwise I'd likely still be using
| it to this day. And my god it was robust. I did unspeakable
| things to that phone and it never chipped or cracked - and
| we're talking drops on to gravel, concrete, and steel.
|
| Hopefully one day we'll see something similar again.
| Shawnj2 wrote:
| Apple tried to bring small phones back and not that many
| people bought the mini relative to the regular size iPhone.
| Other than a few attempts by android phone manufacturers the
| iPhone 13 mini will probably be the best small phone made.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| I was on 12 Mini. Was getting a crazy trade deal and the
| seller didn't have 13 Mini. So I ended up buying 14.
|
| Yesterday, after months, I was inside an Apple reseller
| store and picked iPhone 13 Mini and was immediately made
| aware of the monstrosity that was in my pocket.
|
| Yeah I think Mini is finally dead.
| alwaysbeconsing wrote:
| The thing is, for people who want a small phone, the 13
| mini still has a pretty hefty feel. Compared to the 5s/orig
| SE body it's massive and it's only a tiny bit shorter and
| narrower than the 8/new SE, while feeling thicker.
| Shawnj2 wrote:
| By 2023 standards it's the smallest flagship phone you
| can get, no one makes a flagship tier original SE style
| phone
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| It's battery is very lacklustre. I believe that phone
| that size in this age and time deserves much more
| battery.
|
| I wish Apple kept Mini alive. Maybe at a premium and with
| a better battery.
| Shawnj2 wrote:
| TBH there's not much you can do about that, it actually
| has a better battery life than the 8 IMO
| mhitza wrote:
| The Fairphone is going to be sold in the US in partnership
| with the e.Foundation which develops /e/OS (another deGoogled
| android fork), and is what's going to come preinstalled on
| the Fairphone
| https://murena.com/america/shop/smartphones/brand-
| new/murena...
| palata wrote:
| I have been a happy user of an /e/OS Fairphone 3+ for two
| years. I just use it like my Samsung before, nothing
| special to do (other than choosing non Google apps,
| obviously).
| cge wrote:
| To add to that last point, after some time being frustrated
| with an FP4 and browsing the FP forums: it's not just
| availability of spare parts to repair shops. There doesn't
| appear to be a single mention in the forums of a repair shop
| willing to work on the FP4. There are numerous mentions of
| repair shops that are unwilling to, and of people being unable
| to find repair shops. Warranty repair is actually outsourced to
| a generic warranty support company that appears to operate on
| standard, replace-everything basis.
|
| Apparently, for the FP4 (reportedly in a departure from some
| previous devices), all software development is also outsourced.
| Security patches are often months out of date. Known defects
| with basic functionality (camera hardware should be fine, but
| is almost unusable for many tasks because of poor
| firmware/software making, eg, focusing ridiculously slow;
| microphone noise and echo reduction has serious problems for
| calls, etc) go unaddressed, or, in worse cases, are
| acknowledged as something that won't be fixed, especially for
| the bizarre security flaw that the manufacturer's official OS
| is signed by test keys, and the device is set to trust test
| keys, something that apparently can't be changed, and makes the
| device one minor leak away from having secure boot entirely
| broken. This is apparently one of the reasons why GrapheneOS
| developers refuse to consider supporting it. At the same time,
| other flaws in the security design make it very easy to brick
| the device, as you point out, and FP charges for unbricking
| (the test key problem apparently makes it unsafe for them to
| release a fix): in one case on the forum, a user bricked the
| device by _correctly_ following FP 's own official instructions
| for updating the OS manually, and FP refused to unbrick it
| without charge.
|
| I was astonishingly disappointed by the FP4, to be honest, and
| by Fairphone in general.
| j45 wrote:
| Still, respect to the pioneers who try these devices out
| unreasonably before early adopters come along.
|
| I hade a Note 1. It was so bad Samsung had to replace it with
| the Note 2 in 6 months.
| miduil wrote:
| > There doesn't appear to be a single mention in the forums
| of a repair shop willing to work on the FP4.
|
| That's a good point as well, companies like Framework are
| doing a better job on that front (afair) with releasing
| detailed repair PDFs for shops that need the circuitry to
| debug electrical issues/replace parts. Haven't seen something
| from Fairphone yet.
|
| > Apparently, for the FP4 (reportedly in a departure from
| some previous devices), all software development is also
| outsourced.
|
| Oh, I haven't heard of that yet - till FP3 they had some
| significant in-house development ongoing. This would explain
| why FP3 will get an Android 13 upgrade (from 11) soon, while
| there is no announcement for Android 13 for the FP4 yet.
| cge wrote:
| >That's a good point as well, companies like Framework are
| doing a better job on that front (afair) with releasing
| detailed repair PDFs for shops that need the circuitry to
| debug electrical issues/replace parts. Haven't seen
| something from Fairphone yet.
|
| A frustrating thing is that Fairphone actually _has_
| released quite detailed information for the FP4 [1], I
| think to a significantly greater extent than Framework. It
| just doesn 't actually seem to have developed a real
| culture of repair around it, or developed any real
| connections with independent repair shops beyond just
| putting up a detailed PDF, that isn't necessarily easy to
| find, on their website.
|
| [1]: https://www.fairphone.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2022/09/FP4_Inf...
| miduil wrote:
| Oh that PDF is awesome
| Shawnj2 wrote:
| I think it's a bit easier to release that info for a
| smartphone than an intel laptop
| conradev wrote:
| You mentioned Framework: I hope they make a phone in 3-4
| years.
|
| They made an excellent repairable/upgradeable laptop and
| I'm sure they'd build a great phone
| gsa wrote:
| I really want to love my Fairphone 4 but they really need to
| improve their software support. I have a bunch of bugs with my
| device: the screen dims after a short period making it unusable
| in bright daylight, NFC is erratic and needs a restart to fix, 5
| GHz hotspot hasn't worked for months. The brightness bug is the
| biggest killer for me. There's a whole list of bugs tracked on
| the Fairphone website [0], and progress is unfortunately very
| slow.
|
| [0] https://forum.fairphone.com/t/known-reproducible-and-
| reporte...
| rmdes wrote:
| Issues with microphone on the FP4 that are not explainable but
| the good news is? I can just change the mic for 20 euro!
|
| The real issue with the FP4 is the camera. Ugly pictures, and
| under bad lightning its like taking picture on android a decade
| ago.. Albeit the pixel number is enough.
| londons_explore wrote:
| All modern smartphones have masses of proprietary stuff to turn
| gigabytes of raw data from the sensor into a beautiful photo.
|
| If you want an opensource phone, you end up with crappy photos
| unless you have a camera team of 500 people to rewrite that
| stuff, and a big team of lawyers to deal with all the patent
| licensing you're going to have to do for the techniques you
| use.
| morsch wrote:
| I'm not sure that it's truly all down to software, but as far
| as it is, you don't have start at zero -- there are
| excellent, competitive raw photo processors available as free
| software, like darktable and RawTherapee. Still a lot of
| work, though, no doubt.
| londons_explore wrote:
| heh - no.
|
| Camera stacks on modern phones process _many_ raw frames to
| make a single photo - sometimes as many as 100.
|
| Collecting those frames is done in a second or so before
| and after the user clicks the shutter button. Thats a data
| rate of ~15 Gigabits - far faster than most phones can
| write to storage - and anyway would you be happy for each
| photo to take a few gigabytes of storage space until it was
| processed?
|
| Therefore, the raw data needs to be processed (or at least
| preprocessed) in realtime. You can't store it and do it
| later.
|
| And to do that, you typically need custom silicon - all the
| big phone manufacturers have ASICs dedicated to image
| processing.
|
| And to make the trouble even worse, you often need to use
| data from some of the raw frames to adjust camera
| parameters for the next frame - for example adjusting
| amplifier gains. See patent US9196027B2 for an example of
| the sort of thing that is done 'in the loop'.
| londons_explore wrote:
| If you wanted to do this 'opensource', your best bet is
| to try and get the GPU to do the work. You'd need
| hardware/HAL support for streaming raw data at ~15Gbits
| to GPU accessible memory, and after that you can probably
| do most of the rest using software without
| hardware/kernel involvement.
|
| At a minimum, the GPU needs to be able to generate image
| scale pyramids, align them using optical flow, have a
| sensor noise model to detect misalignment, and take a
| running-mean of every non-misaligned pixel in each frame
| seen. This technique only needs enough ram for a handful
| of frames.
|
| That should get you a good chunk of the way to a decent
| image.
|
| As usual, the actual math is quite simple in python, but
| when you need it to run at 15 Gbits you'll be spending a
| really long time optimising assembly code for whatever
| GPU you're using...
| verall wrote:
| The SoC in the fairphone has an ISP, they can just use
| that.
| londons_explore wrote:
| The ISP is locked down and can only run qualcomm-code.
| Perhaps with the right licensing agreement they'd let you
| run your own code on it.
| stevezsa8 wrote:
| This is cool and all... I just wish someone would release a
| device with user replaceable battery and better OS update
| policies. Basically a pixel with slightly easier repair.
|
| I think the modular aspect is cool, but seems like a gimmick that
| would be prone to failure. Just my opinion anyway.
| dimitar wrote:
| I have a Fairphone 4 and I can replace the batter and upgrade
| the OS (a choice of multiple ones is available)
| stevezsa8 wrote:
| I was tempted after a colleague got the FP4. In the end I
| decided to get a pixel 6a for half the price.
|
| I'm taking a bet on not smashing the handset. EUR300 extra
| was just too much for a replaceable battery. Atleast for my
| usecase.
| mcny wrote:
| Congratulations to the fairphone team on shipping.
|
| I have two questions though.
|
| 1. Bands: does it have all the bands for GSM carriers in the US?
| CDMA?
|
| 2. Can you use this phone powered solely by the charger with the
| battery removed? With a 65W Thinkpad charger?
| Paianni wrote:
| GSM, CDMA and UMTS are all dead or on their way out in the US.
| In terms of LTE bands I think T-Mobile (or MVNO's depending on
| their network) is the sole choice.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| It might work on verizon but it lacks their low bands so
| coverage won't be good. No way it works on AT&T due to their
| stupid IMEI whitelisting. Notably it's also missing
| T-Mobile's N25 which is probably going to be their main
| midband 5G band eventually, but it has all the others (no B26
| LTE but that's old sprint towers almost entirely phased out)
| frazar0 wrote:
| Fairphone 4 has been my main and only phone for several months
| now. Great experience, very good battary life. Performance-wise,
| I haven't noticed any significant difference compared to
| traditional phones. The only drawbacks might be the camera and
| thickness, but honestly I don't care much.
|
| Of course, much depends on your use case and expectations. YMMV.
| dadoomer wrote:
| Is it possible to swap batteries on the go? That'd be killer.
|
| I only replaced my phone this year (S7 edge) because the
| battery was depleting too fast.
| Lariscus wrote:
| Yes, the battery is removable just like an old Nokia phone.
| zeroCalories wrote:
| I like that we're moving in the direction of repairability. I
| haven't needed to upgrade my pixel 2, and I would love it if I
| could simply replace parts as needed instead of buying a whole
| new phone. That said, it seems clear that phone makers would
| prefer you upgrade every two years. Wonder if we will see
| regulation around that in the coming years.
| passwordoops wrote:
| >seems clear that phone makers would prefer you upgrade every
| two years
|
| And of course they all have PR and websites devoted to how much
| they care about the environment, even positive ESG scores in
| some cases
| S4mb wrote:
| When people talk about the Fairphone there are always people
| bringing up the same or similar (often very valid) points. I
| would like to use this post sum up some Reddit discussion I took
| part in when the Fairphone 3 launched because the main points are
| still relevant for the Fairphone 4 launch:
|
| Q: Wasn't the point of Fairphone to have ONE phone and then buy
| "extensions" or/and replacements only, aka modular - for the sake
| of preserving the environment, etc etc?!
|
| A. No, it was always for repairability to ensure people can keep
| it for around five years without needing to replace the entire
| thing at once because the screen cracked or the audio jack broke.
|
| This whole upgrade part stuff is something that get's hyped a lot
| in online discussions but from the very beginning Fairphone has
| been very honest and cautious when asked about possible upgrade
| modules in the future. They would love to offer crazy upgrade
| paths but cmon it's a small company in Amsterdam with limited
| resources.
|
| However they did introduce an upgraded camera module in 2017.
|
| I think the main takeaway I have for everybody regarding the
| Fairphone is: Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. I've
| preordered the Fairphone 2, got it in 2016. People ask me about
| it often. They usually get very excited only to get disappointed
| when they realize that the team behind it has to make compromises
| just like every other phone brand has to.
|
| The fact that they got this product designed, launched and
| supported with <100 people is really amazing, so please don't
| feel disappointed by the fact that it doesn't offer something
| even Google couldn't get market ready.
|
| These guys make really good phones that are not only as fair as
| it gets but also as innovative as it gets when it comes to the
| overall design. They introduced a camera upgrade module in 2017
| which is amazing, other than that it's really just making your
| life easier when you want to replace parts.
|
| I replaced the screen and the audio jack, the phone is still rock
| solid.
|
| Q: What about Software? I keep my phones mostly 3 years, because
| even after 3 years, many LOS devs are jumping ship...?
|
| A: They definitively do their homework. Security updates come
| usually ~3 weeks after Google releases them. Fairphone OS still
| gets bigger updates every ~2-3 months. They still support their
| Fairphone Open OS. Lineage OS is really popular on it and is well
| supported offering Android Pie for the Fairphone 2.
|
| For the Fairphone 3, the manufacturer guaranteed five years of
| support. This means that replacement parts are available for five
| years and security updates are offered. In addition, the
| manufacturer promises a feature update to Android 10, but does
| not call for a date. Additional feature updates are planned but
| not guaranteed. For the sold out since March 2019 Fairphone 2
| (available since the end of 2015), the manufacturer will continue
| to publish security updates and reserve spare parts for at least
| another three years.
|
| The Fairphone 2 was delivered with Android 5.1, later came
| updates to 6.01 and 7.1.2 - the latter with great effort, because
| there were no official drivers for the Snapdragon 801 chipset
| used.
|
| "Q": What an awful phone. Anyone who buys this is an idiot, you
| aren't saving the world and all you're doing is making yourself
| feel holier than thou because of your "ethical" decision which
| you can't be quiet about.
|
| Save your money and get a REAL phone with much better specs for
| the same price.
|
| A: It's still a step in the right direction.
|
| I also don't see the problem with feeling cool about "ethical"
| decisions.
|
| I definetely think my Fairphone 2 is cool. I think it's tacky,
| chunky and technical look is beautiful and it sparks interesting
| conversations with other people that think it's cool. If fair and
| open... If having a seven year old phone that looks absolutely
| worn out becomes the new mainstream cool that would be the best
| thing to ever happen to us.
|
| I for myself feel pretty cool when people ask me about my phone
| and how old it is. I also feel better, yes.
|
| "Q": We shouldn't care about the conditions our phones are made
| in. We should care about the best value for our money,
| performance and quality.
|
| A: Well you know that's just like your opinion man.
|
| "Q": YEA lol pay [price of the prior Fairphone] for a phone just
| to feel good about your enviromental impact. top kek.
|
| A: As you may know the Fairphone is not only trying to improve
| the enviromental impact, the company is also doing as much as
| possible to improve the situation of the involved asian workers.
| I would like to use this moment of awareness created by the
| Fairphone 3 announcement to invite you to get a small glimpse
| into the live of Xu, your typical Foxconn phone assembly line
| worker. Please excuse that I just copy & pasted this together.
|
| On the last day of September, a 24-year-old migrant worker in the
| southern Chinese city of Shenzhen killed himself. Xu Lizhi jumped
| out of a window of a residential dormitory run by his employer,
| Foxconn, the huge electronics manufacturing company with a
| million-strong workforce that makes the majority of the world's
| Apple iPhones.
|
| In most cases, Xu's suicide would have been yet another footnote
| in the vast, sweeping story of China's economic boom and
| transformation. He is one of a legion of young Chinese migrants
| who emerge out of rural obscurity to find work in China's teeming
| cities, only to end up crushed by both the dullness and stress of
| factory jobs, insufficient wages and a steady accumulation of
| personal disappointments.
|
| But Xu was a poet. And, after his death, his friends collected
| his work and got some published in a local Shenzhen newspaper.
| <<Yi Ke Luo Si Diao Zai Di Shang >> "A Screw Fell to the Ground"
| Yi Ke Luo Si Diao Zai Di Shang A screw fell to the ground
| Zai Zhe Ge Jia Ban De Ye Wan In this dark night of overtime
| Chui Zhi Jiang Luo ,Qing Qing Yi Xiang Plunging vertically,
| lightly clinking Bu Hui Yin Qi Ren He Ren De Zhu Yi
| It won't attract anyone's attention Jiu Xiang Zai Ci
| Zhi Qian Just like last time Mou Ge Xiang Tong De
| Ye Wan On a night like this You Ge Ren Diao Zai Di
| Shang When someone plunged to the ground -- 9
| January 2014
|
| Reading through the poems, one in particular stood out to me, 'A
| screw Fell to the Ground.' While it was done eight months before
| his suicide, the context seems to be relatable to how he may have
| been feeling--mostly the sound of "someone" plunging and nobody
| hearing. We ran along the railway,
| arriving in some place called 'the City' where we
| trade in our youth, and our muscle. Finally we have
| nothing to trade, only a cough and a skeleton nobody
| cares about. 'Sleepless'
|
| The poems, translated at the leftist website Libcom.org, are a
| wrenching echo of the alienation and hardship felt by countless
| people in modern China and, for that matter, in other parts of
| the developing world. They lament the grinding ennui of the
| assembly line, the squalor of a migrant worker's narrow,
| frustrated existence.
|
| You can find more of his works here:
| https://libcom.org/blog/xulizhi-foxconn-suicide-poetry
|
| You can also check out the complete cost breakdown of the
| Fairphone 2 here: https://www.fairphone.com/de/2015/09/09/cost-
| breakdown-of-th...
|
| But don't let me guilt trip you into buying this phone. The
| Fairphone 2 was an amazing device and I am sure the Fairphone 3
| will be a solid upgrade. This is a great phone line and not some
| shitty alternative. The Fairphone 2 definetely had some
| reliability issues. I believe it was the right decision to
| introduce more screws and flat cables to make it more reliable
| and decrease additional material was needed for all the pogo pin
| connectors that made the Fairphone 2 extremely quick and easy to
| disassemble but also prone to all the random connectivity issues.
|
| The FP3 is still as good as it gets when it comes to
| repairability. The changes to the FP3 give me hope that it could
| finally become a reliable phone as well.
|
| Every gripe I had about the Fairphone 2 after using it since 2015
| got addressed in this new iteration.
| progval wrote:
| > Q: Wasn't the point of Fairphone to have ONE phone and then
| buy "extensions" or/and replacements only, aka modular - for
| the sake of preserving the environment, etc etc?!
|
| Sounds like they are confusing it with "Phoneblocks", which
| went viral around the time the FP1 launched. Logos look
| similar, too.
| itsacomment wrote:
| It's not only the Asian workers! They also go to great pains to
| make sure the people mining the basic resources, for example in
| the Congo or in Peru, are paid more fairly than usual. That
| combined with pretty much what you said makes the price easily
| worth it for me.
| t0bia_s wrote:
| Dimensions 162 x 75.5 x 10.5 mm are huge. Not for my pocket and
| hands. And I'm a tall person.
| ctenb wrote:
| My experience with fp4 has been pleasant. No problems. The only
| mild annoyance was the finger print unlock mechanism, which feels
| less user-friendly than my previous phones. But you get used to
| it.
| jaylittle wrote:
| Years ago this would've been interesting to me. But it took too
| long. Given that the Fairphone 4 has been out everywhere else for
| years now and there wasn't even a peep of it coming to the US, I
| decided to jump ship for an iPhone.
|
| If I couldn't get a truly repairable phone, then at least I could
| buy the one that would likely last the longest given the wide
| availability of official repair outlets (e.g. Apple Stores) and
| the history of solid software support for at least five years.
|
| So that's where I am at. Thankfully things are looking a bit
| better on the laptop side of the repairability fence. I have
| every intention of pre-ordering a Framework 16 the second pre-
| orders open.
| coding123 wrote:
| $600? Doesn't it make sense to buy 3 shit phones that can't be
| repaired for $200 each? Is this phone worth $600?
| fsflover wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36653377
| ntnsndr wrote:
| Tester here. After some months of working out the kinks, this
| phone and OS pair are working great. I strongly recommend (if you
| are okay with a so-so camera).
| zabzonk wrote:
| see also nokia g22:
| https://www.nokia.com/phones/en_int/nokia-g-22/specs?sku=101...
| joecool1029 wrote:
| This device has no US carrier band support, it's neat device I
| guess but terrible suggestion given the submission is about FP4
| going to US.
| zabzonk wrote:
| sorry, i didn't realise the usa don't do g3 and g4
| mhitza wrote:
| > Built with recycled materials. Engineered to last longer.
|
| > OS upgrades: 2 years of OS upgrades
|
| > Security updates: 3 years of monthly security updates (From
| the global launch date of the device)
|
| And I didn't see any iFixit rating. Aside from using recycled
| materials, don't see much in common on the surface.
| manmal wrote:
| People should focus more on waste avoidance and reuse instead
| of buying a new gadget allegedly made from recycled materials
| that only lasts 3 years. I say allegedly because making
| durable, nicely colored materials from waste is so hard that
| we don't know what tricks were used or shortcuts were taken
| to make this happen.
| zabzonk wrote:
| ifixit are supporting it: https://www.ifixit.com/Device/Nokia
| _G22#Section_Parts_and_To...
| jokoon wrote:
| So does it mean it's not possible to have popular apps like
| whatsapp or Tinder on this?
|
| I also wish it was just a phone with much less performance for a
| smaller price.
|
| I want something durable and repairable, not something fast,
| Wirth's law is very important to consider when consider software
| and hardware. I hope they will make such phone, one day, because
| I am not spending that much money for a phone.
|
| I bought a 150 euro phone and it already lasted 3 years, because
| even if a phone becomes obsolete, it is still cheaper, per year,
| to use crappy phones, than to use a durable expensive phone.
|
| If your really care about fairness and the environment, make
| lightweight hardware and software.
| zerox7felf wrote:
| I have been using a FP4 for about a year with /e/-os, and it
| has been pretty ok so far. I don't use many (if any) of the
| /e/-os cloud features, so can't speak for those. Other apps
| have been working fine w/ microG and the custom app store
| (which combines the play store and fdroid). The only issue I
| can think of off the top of my head is google translate not
| working. Other Gapps (Gmail, yt, lens, etc) seem to work fine,
| as do pretty much all others I have tried. Unsure how well in-
| app purchases work. Some /e/-os apps have UI quirks... But
| nothing is worse than "ok" in my view. Ymmv.
|
| Not sure I buy that lightweight phones would necessarily be
| better for the environment? Surely repairability is key?
| jokoon wrote:
| Cost and affordability.
|
| Also a less powerful CPU has a longer battery life.
| dopidopHN wrote:
| Or keep your phone. I've been using a iPhone 5s since 8 years
| now. Support dropper a year ago iirc. So that's not advisable
| anymore. But I'm still happy with the phone and most things
| still work
| jokowueu wrote:
| It has microG you can download the apps you want including the
| play store
| frollo wrote:
| I've got a FP3 (so the older model) and I have had no problems
| with any app. I don't use Tinder, but Whatsapp works as good as
| on any phone I've ever owned.
|
| As for the cheapness, I've been keeping a running tab of how
| much the repair is costing me vs how much it would have cost
| with a normal phone (ballpark estimate) and, considering the
| phone price, I'm currently saving about 200EUR, even factoring
| in the phone price. The biggest expense is shipping because I
| live in the middle of nowhere and I can easily get 10EUR of
| shipping on a 15EUR spare part (which is why I'm not replacing
| the protective cover even though it looks like shit).
| TheMode wrote:
| Is the hardware really the bottleneck to sustainable device? The
| software seems more much important but nobody is tackling it.
|
| Having a phone with a new battery doesn't matter if I can't run
| the same apps as others.
| phh wrote:
| As a software engineer who spend the vast majority of his time
| on (successfully) putting newer Android versions on the vast
| majority of older Android devices:
|
| Yes the hardware is the bottleneck.
|
| This pains me, because what I can do is software, not hardware,
| where I spend all of my time is software.
|
| An app just needs to target Android 7 to target 95%+ of users
| (so "only" 5% additional e-waste). And for app developers,
| targeting Android 7 is fairly easy (and the vast majority do),
| because Google provide androidx which is a compatibility
| library that provides backward-compatible APIs for every new
| shiny things. It's not 0 effort, and I understand app
| developers preferring Apple ecosystem here, but most of the
| Android app developers I've seen do use androidx and do target
| around Android 7. [1]
|
| So, you get reasonably 5-7 years of app that are still working.
| The average renewal rate still barely bulged and still is
| around 2 years. People are not renewing their devices because
| of apps that are no longer supported.
|
| IMO things that make people renew:
|
| - Things that are a bit broken but annoying enough and
| accumulate: Too many apps leading to slow down, USB-C port
| getting dust making the connection harder
|
| - The phones always look shinier in-store (because of over-
| saturated, over-brightness-ed screen amongst other things), so
| I'm pretty sure stores would manage to sell the same device
| over and over again by just changing the name.
|
| - Kinda the same: Despite Gorilla Glass 424 Ultra Pro Max,
| screen's glass do wear, and phones' screen look worse and worse
| over time (if you have a screen protection, the screen will
| still look shinier in-store, if you don't your screen will be
| weary, and the screen in-store will look shinier) -- I like
| what Rebel Tech is trying to do here, they are trying to
| replace exclusively the glass part of the screen. That's so
| much cheaper that you could do it every 6 months to make your
| device look new again.
|
| - Completely random software bug (which could very well be
| BECAUSE the device got a software upgrade, or could be just a
| bug in the app, or just Google decided that this was the new
| Best User Experience) that make people think "yeah well I get
| it, my phone's old"
|
| [1] I do know of one exception: Slack app. They are deprecating
| Android 7 and Android 8. They suck.
| londons_explore wrote:
| For most users, it only takes _one_ critical app to say it
| refuses to run because the device is too old, and the user
| will upgrade.
| TheMode wrote:
| I fully understand your concerns, but still I believe that
| you aren't asking yourself the right question. Why do you
| need to port newer Android versions on older devices at all?
| It seems like the real problem to me.
|
| Why do running newer software must depend on a newer
| operating system? Do you believe that everything that is part
| of the android codebase is necessary to run a chat app?
|
| Part of the problem is that we seemingly gave up on trying to
| make software stable, and now we are wrongly putting the
| blame on hardware manufacturers for not wanting to spend
| their whole life supporting it
| phh wrote:
| Looks like I mis-explained.
|
| There is no need to port newer Android versions on older
| devices. My point was literally that it doesn't make people
| keep their devices longer.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Google will no longer let you upload an app to the store
| that is compatible with old android.
|
| Doing so is a privacy loophole, since newer OS's have
| stronger privacy protections.
| londons_explore wrote:
| > USB-C port getting dust
|
| The designers of USB-C should be ashamed of themselves for
| not doing more durability testing. Both cables and sockets
| are big pain points for most users.
| pmontra wrote:
| More reasons:
|
| Phone is lost
|
| Phone breaks beyond a reasonable cost of repair
|
| Phone fills up with WhatsApp pictures and after months or
| years of deleting them they buy a new phone with double
| storage, which is already not enough.
|
| Children grow, get the old phone of one of their parents and
| the parent buys a new one.
| mrpopo wrote:
| They also provide 5-year software support.
|
| https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/997918043739...
|
| > For Fairphone 4, we guarantee software support until the end
| of 2026, this includes an upgrade to Android 12 and, later on,
| Android 13.
| denismi wrote:
| Doesn't that mean that buying the newest Fairphone in 2023
| gets you 0 years of Android updates and 3 years of security
| updates? Compared to 4 years of each with a midrange Galaxy
| A?
| mrpopo wrote:
| The FP4 was out in 2021. That's 5 years. But you're right,
| and it's actually discounted 50 eur because of that. You
| can wait for the FP5 if you're not satisfied
| TheMode wrote:
| That's not solving anything at all, what we need is hardware
| that doesn't need to have its software updated constantly. If
| you cannot have that, I wouldn't consider it ""sustainable"".
| There is nothing sustainable about depending on some company
| on the other side on the world to do the right thing
| continuously.
|
| Now sure, you could answer that they are doing it better than
| others and you may be perfectly right, but is it really the
| way we want to solve it? Gossiping on every company on how
| often they update their software?
| lawn wrote:
| > what we need is hardware that doesn't need to have its
| software updated constantly.
|
| That's just not possible if you value security at all.
| TheMode wrote:
| It is indeed not possible if we keep making software the
| same way. But it doesn't have to be.
| lawn wrote:
| It's simply not possible to make bug-free software that's
| supposed to interact with the internet.
|
| And even if it did, it would take so long to develop that
| it would never get released before it was already too old
| to be useful.
| TheMode wrote:
| This is because you are still assuming software being
| developed the same way. Could you give me an example of
| potential risk that is absolutely impossible to solve no
| matter how we change the entire computing process (from
| users running the app, to the app developer, and to the
| os developers)
|
| I am not suggesting anything that would increase
| development time, in fact it is the opposite. Having to
| explicitly support multiple platforms is hell for both
| developers AND users
| lawn wrote:
| Cryptographic functions for example. Today they might be
| cutting edge, but tomorrow someone might have found a
| critical exploit or the hardware has just become too
| powerful.
| notRobot wrote:
| You don't have to update it if you don't want to?
| TheMode wrote:
| I will likely have some software compatibility/security
| issue by using a 10y old phone. Theoretically I do not
| have to, but software is designed with constant internal
| requirement changes.
| throwawayadvsec wrote:
| Every single useful device on earth that is connected to
| the internet needs to be updated regularly.
|
| You sounds like a salesperson telling a dev "why didn't
| you make our software bug free and vulnerability
| free????"
|
| You're free to use Windows XP and a Nokia 3310.
| TheMode wrote:
| > Every single useful device on earth that is connected
| to the internet needs to be updated regularly.
|
| Could you explain me why?
|
| I am not saying that developer should simply make
| software bug free, I know that this is impossible, I
| however believe that you could heavily reduce friction
| point by simply having less code, and reducing the
| software reliance on the hardware/OS
|
| Monolithic projects like Android prevents it from
| happening, you have to depend on that huge codebase to
| run any software, and as every software must follow
| Android update path, you need to continuously update your
| hardware
| throwawayadvsec wrote:
| "Could you explain me why?"
|
| Well for starters bug and vulnerabilities. Hundred of
| millions/or even billions of devices are hackable without
| that much effort, why? Because people use outdated
| versions of their software.
|
| >Monolithic projects like Android prevents it from
| happening, you have to depend on that huge codebase to
| run any software,
|
| You could say the same about any decent OS.
|
| If you want no updates and don't care about features, get
| a Nokia 3310.
|
| >you need to continuously update your hardware
|
| No one is preventing you from using a 10 yo device with
| hundreds of vulnerabilities and 500mb of ram.
| msh wrote:
| Apple does quite well on this. Also Samsung on some devices
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| Fairphone is also tackling this. They guarantee 5 years but
| have been providing updates well past that. The Fairphone 2
| from 2015 got upgrades to Android 6, 7, 9 and 10 with the
| latest security update in March this year. You can see their
| release notes here: https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/360019515018
| TheMode wrote:
| I would rather call it a workaround. They are doing the exact
| same thing everyone do, but for longer.
|
| Which I guess is better, but they are not tackling the root
| of the problem.
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| Besides not making smartphones what do you think the actual
| root problem is and how would you tackle it?
| TheMode wrote:
| I believe that the root problems are programs having
| direct access to environment, being compiled down to
| hardware instructions, and these instructions not being
| easily interpretable (without having access to an already
| made interpreter)
|
| These problems cause software to depend on highly
| specific platforms [1] that prevent any hardware from
| being standalone-ly sustainable.
|
| * Environment access creates the opportunity for security
| risks, and dependencies that cannot be fulfilled on
| different platforms (e.g. asking for touch input on a
| desktop device)
|
| * Being compiled to hardware specific instructions
| obviously prevent the same software to run on different
| hardware, rendering them obsolete sooner than otherwise
| necessary
|
| * These instructions being hard to implement prevent
| individual users from creating their own interpreter,
| therefore creating the need for a centralized entity to
| provide it.
|
| In other word, my suggestion would be to create a new
| target platform that compile down to a very
| understandable instruction set ("understandable"
| referring to the amount of time it would take for a new
| developer to fully implement it) and leave environment
| access out of the spec (How the software convert an input
| request to your mouse position remains platform
| specific).
|
| This way, all software becomes permanently available
| without depending on any external entity, but new devices
| would still be free to improve the process
|
| [1] - https://support.discord.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/213491697-What...
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| > In other word, my suggestion would be to create a new
| target platform that compile down to a very
| understandable instruction set and leave environment
| access out of the spec
|
| This is already the case. The vast complexity of modern
| software and hardware comes from the ever more complex
| environment they interact with.
|
| If you take a nice small instruction set - leaving
| environment access out of the spec, and then attach
| device specific cameras, modems, displays, sensors,
| accelerators, etc. and then build an OS with a web
| browser and apps that interact with all the extra
| hardware. What you've invented is the modern smart phone.
| It runs on ARM - an easily interpretable instruction set.
|
| Discord not running on older phones is entirely due to
| them depending on newer operating system APIs. It's not
| the instructions that changed, the environment did.
| TheMode wrote:
| > The vast complexity of modern software and hardware
| comes from the ever more complex environment they
| interact with.
|
| 100% agree, hence my suggestion to completely remove
| environment access from the instruction set. No syscall.
|
| > It runs on ARM - an easily interpretable instruction
| set.
|
| I give you 2 hours to write a brand new fully spec
| compliant ARMv8 interpreter, 3 hours to write an android
| VM to run on my windows laptop.
|
| > Discord not running on older phones is entirely due to
| them depending on newer operating system APIs. It's not
| the instructions that changed, the environment did.
|
| The instructions allowed them to depend on platform
| specific features, which is what I want to prevent.
|
| Instead of calling some random android
| `external_is_switch_gesture` syscall the app should
| request a boolean/bit given a string "Has there been a
| switch gesture?" and expect the result of that syscall to
| be what they asked for.
|
| Then, it would be up to the OS to decide how to interpret
| that request, maybe that the string is part of some
| standardized way to retrieve a gesture input in which way
| automate it, but if it is not you could simply prompt the
| user to chose what to give the application given a list
| of all the possible environment access.
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| > I give you 2 hours to write a brand new fully spec
| compliant ARMv8 interpreter, 3 hours to write an android
| VM to run on my windows laptop.
|
| 2 hours is pushing it for pretty much anything. I am
| pretty confident I can make a 64bit risc-v interpreter
| that'll boot Linux in a few days. Wouldn't be fast and
| wouldn't have IO, but neither of those have any baring on
| how easy the instructions are to interpret. The spec is
| fairly easy to understand.
|
| > The instructions allowed them to depend on platform
| specific features, which is what I want to prevent. >
| Instead of calling some random android
| `external_is_switch_gesture` syscall the app should
| request a boolean/bit given a string "Has there been a
| switch gesture?" and expect the result of that syscall to
| be what they asked for.
|
| Ok so in order to make it fast we're not going to use
| strings, instead integers that we only ever increment for
| new syscalls (no conflicts, ever). Applications want to
| know whether the system has support for a syscall, so we
| return an error if they don't exist. This is how Linux
| syscalls work.
|
| Lets use your hypothetical: I'm writing a game that makes
| heavy use of switch geatures. I make my game call the
| "Has there been a switch gesture?" syscall, but whoops
| switch gestures were added in version 6 but this customer
| is using version 5. The absense of this syscall is
| fundamentally incompatible with my game, so I guess I'll
| put "requires version 6" on the website.
|
| This is the status quo. Nothing you've suggested is a
| fundamental change to how software/hardware works. As
| long as new things are being invented/written you can
| never have full backwards compatibility.
|
| > but if it is not you could simply prompt the user to
| chose what to give the application given a list of all
| the possible environment access.
|
| Just to be thorough this is fully possible right now -
| intercepting unknown syscalls and showing a prompt - but
| there's simply way too many and their behavior too
| complex for it to be of any use. Especially non-experts
| would have exactly zero chance.
| TheMode wrote:
| > 2 hours is pushing it for pretty much anything.
|
| bf could, lambda calculus as well, or potentially
| cellular automata. Also implementing IO is still
| important, as the apps depend on it. What I am saying in
| my case is that the hardware manufacturer should expose
| the basic hardware features as functions (so immutable,
| there is nothing to update here) and you would then be
| able to implement whatever your app is written in and
| reuse the primitive hardware functions.
|
| > Ok so in order to make it fast we're not going to use
| strings,
|
| Why would strings be slower? These would be part of the
| static binary. These calls being hint and not necessarily
| standardized is an important part. Standards are the same
| as environments, they always evolve.
|
| > Applications want to know whether the system has
| support for a syscall, so we return an error if they
| don't exist. This is how Linux syscalls work.
|
| You may want to do something with the call even if the
| guaranteed syscall isn't there. I am meaning the string
| as a hint, not as an api
|
| > but whoops switch gestures were added in version 6 but
| this customer is using version 5. The absense of this
| syscall is fundamentally incompatible with my game, so I
| guess I'll put "requires version 6" on the website.
|
| Switch gestures cannot be linked to a software version.
| It is hardware. As long as you can listen to touch input
| and optionally multi-touch you have physical support for
| all gestures. It being limited to version 6 or above is
| an arbitrary limitation, and indeed will cause the
| software to delimit what's supported. Whereas if your
| software only exposed a "has there been a switch gesture"
| visible to the users, they could decide that actually a
| button press should be considered as a switch, or they
| could use a separate library that convert touch inputs
| into a yes/no switch, or perhaps that their devices
| already come with some hardware accelerated switch
| gesture control that they can plug into it.
|
| > As long as new things are being invented/written you
| can never have full backwards compatibility.
|
| The problem is that when making software you are forced
| to reinvent the whole chain. I simply cannot make a
| calculator app with the guarantee that it will be able to
| run decades from now, I need to include the binary that
| open the window, get the OpenGL context, write the
| boilerplate so I can draw individual pixels, etc.
|
| But what if my compiled program only contained basic flow
| logic and an input and output? Essentially a function.
| And when users run it, how that function behaves with the
| environment is device specific and as the calculator
| developer I couldn't care any less.
|
| Obviously, if you make a VR game it will be pretty hard
| to emulate it on a gameboy, but there is nothing
| justifying that I cannot make my own discord port on an
| arduino (except speed, but this is a convenience)
|
| > Just to be thorough this is fully possible right now -
| intercepting unknown syscalls and showing a prompt - but
| there's simply way too many and their behavior too
| complex for it to be of any use. Especially non-experts
| would have exactly zero chance.
|
| I agree, that's because we do not assign proper meaning
| to these syscalls. Users wouldnt know what to do, I am
| not saying that we need to expose raw file descriptors or
| make the user handle async i/o. I however believe that we
| should make this option more viable, for example by
| allowing applications to transform whatever they want
| into an environment request so they become more
| straightforward. And the less syscall you do, the easier
| it will be for users to make their ports.
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| > bf could, lambda calculus as well, or potentially
| cellular automata
|
| Good luck turning those into silicon with any kind of
| performance.
|
| > Why would strings be slower? These would be part of the
| static binary. These calls being hint and not necessarily
| standardized is an important part.
|
| Because string comparisons are slow. Non-standardized
| hints are not a basis upon which software can be built.
| What you've described are APIs with loose coupling, which
| is the current status quo.
|
| > As long as you can listen to touch input and optionally
| multi-touch you have physical support for all gestures.
| It being limited to version 6 or above is an arbitrary
| limitation, and indeed will cause the software to delimit
| what's supported. Whereas if your software only exposed a
| "has there been a switch gesture" visible to the users,
| they could decide that actually a button press should be
| considered as a switch, or they could use a separate
| library that convert touch inputs into a yes/no switch,
| or perhaps that their devices already come with some
| hardware accelerated switch gesture control that they can
| plug into it.
|
| This is _again_ the status quo. I can write a library
| that implements all the APIs needed to run discord on
| older versions of Android. It 's simply a non-trivial
| amount of work for little benefit and thus hasn't
| happened.
|
| > The problem is that when making software you are forced
| to reinvent the whole chain. I simply cannot make a
| calculator app with the guarantee that it will be able to
| run decades from now, I need to include the binary that
| open the window, get the OpenGL context, write the
| boilerplate so I can draw individual pixels, etc. > But
| what if my compiled program only contained basic flow
| logic and an input and output? Essentially a function.
| And when users run it, how that function behaves with the
| environment is device specific and as the calculator
| developer I couldn't care any less.
|
| Your OS can't design a GUI for you, unless you're
| assuming the OS is also an artificial general
| intelligence. So really what you're asking for already
| exists: the CLI.
|
| GUI apps are complex to make because their behavior is
| complex. Take your simple input and output, make the
| input include all window events and the output the file
| system/display/etc. and you end up doing all the same
| things.
|
| > Obviously, if you make a VR game it will be pretty hard
| to emulate it on a gameboy, but there is nothing
| justifying that I cannot make my own discord port on an
| arduino (except speed, but this is a convenience)
|
| You can totally port discord to an arduino! Get it to
| boot linux, run a web browser and open discordapp.com.
| You'll run out of RAM long before you get there, but just
| hook up an SSD for swap. Performance is just a
| convenience after all.
|
| > I agree, that's because we do not assign proper meaning
| to these syscalls. Users wouldnt know what to do, I am
| not saying that we need to expose raw file descriptors or
| make the user handle async i/o. I however believe that we
| should make this option more viable, for example by
| allowing applications to transform whatever they want
| into an environment request so they become more
| straightforward. And the less syscall you do, the easier
| it will be for users to make their ports.
|
| All this is essentially doing is turning libraries into
| syscalls. It's a loosely coupled external dependency and
| has all the same problems that entails regardless of what
| form its in.
|
| I think the core issue you're trying to address is
| fragmentation. Unfortunately it's a natural result of
| people interacting with one another, not something you
| can fix with good design or software. It ends up leading
| to a lot of wasted work, but it's also a massive drive to
| innovate.
|
| I'm going to sign off here. Thanks for discussing this, I
| honestly do find your idea interesting.
| TheMode wrote:
| > Good luck turning those into silicon with any kind of
| performance.
|
| It doesn't have to be the hardware ISA, nothing would
| prevent the hardware manufacturer from including a
| compiler.
|
| > Because string comparisons are slow. Non-standardized
| hints are not a basis upon which software can be built.
|
| The comparison will only happen once, I do not think that
| we should argue about 2-3 string comparisons heating our
| CPUs. And you can definitely build software this way, you
| just need to work on the way the user map its hardware to
| the software.
|
| > I can write a library that implements all the APIs
| needed to run discord on older versions of Android
|
| But the hardware is there, the problem is that the
| mapping must be done through low level code.
|
| > Your OS can't design a GUI for you, unless you're
| assuming the OS is also an artificial general
| intelligence.
|
| I am not speaking about AI, but I do believe that our OSs
| could help us draw an interface from data. There are many
| UI creation tool, but they aren't meant to be real-time.
|
| > GUI apps are complex to make because their behavior is
| complex.
|
| They are complex to write, but very simple to describe
| (if you accept to give up on some details). I could
| describe my HN page layout to you way faster using
| english than html/css. GUI apps are complex because we
| are trying to map them to weird standards. Good luck
| implementing a CSS parser.
|
| > You can totally port discord to an arduino! Get it to
| boot linux, run a web browser and open discordapp.com.
|
| You can theoretically do it yes, in the same way
| developers could in theory port their apps to every
| single platform current and future. But in practice it
| isn't the case, and my calculator app will likely stop
| working in 5 years because of some weird API change.
|
| > I think the core issue you're trying to address is
| fragmentation. Unfortunately it's a natural result of
| people interacting with one another, not something you
| can fix with good design or software. It ends up leading
| to a lot of wasted work, but it's also a massive drive to
| innovate.
|
| I believe otherwise, instead of fighting against new
| platforms by exposing restrictive standards, I want to
| embrace the different platforms by allowing developers to
| write what they app should do instead of how. If your
| apps want to draw pixels, they should just draw pixel.
| How the windows must open is completely irrelevant and
| the OS/user should be able to figure that out.
| fsflover wrote:
| Looks like you need a GNU/Linux phone like Librem 5 or
| Pinephone.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| All I can say is good luck with all of that. I don't see
| any company ever doing that.
| mhotchen wrote:
| I think yes. It's not easy to design and manufacture a phone
| using sustainable materials and components from vetted sources
| who treat their employees fairly, unfortunately. And to do it
| in such a way as to be easily repairable. They've set
| themselves a high bar and I think they've done a great job
|
| The software can be improved iteratively. Hopefully as they
| grow in new markets we'll see more investment in e-OS and
| (hopefully) find a viable competitor to Google that's open
| source
| cge wrote:
| As a note about repairability, ignoring various problems with the
| phone: while the FP4 does have more availability of parts from
| the manufacturer, is generally easier to repair, and is
| advertised as repairable, I found the Fairphone forums to be
| surprisingly and unexpectedly hostile to discussions of repair
| and repairability.
|
| A significant portion of the forum userbase considers that
| Fairphone's _primary_ focus is on fair trade, the treatment of
| workers, and the sourcing of raw materials. Regular posters, and
| highlighted users ( "Fairphone Angels"), will often argue to
| users that the phone is _not_ primarily meant to be repairable or
| longer-lasting than other phones. Concerns about outdated
| security updates and long-lasting, serious software problems with
| basic functionality often get responses about workers in phone
| manufacturing, and reminders that this is the point of the phone.
| This goes directly against Fairphone 's own advertising, but it
| seems to be the general sense amongst users the company attaches
| their name to.
|
| Coming from the Framework forums, this was astonishing and
| disappointing.
| gclawes wrote:
| I'd buy a Framework phone in an instant...
| amelius wrote:
| Yes. But what OS would it run out of the box? And what would
| you run on it?
| christophilus wrote:
| I'd want to run Debian + Phosh.
| pshirshov wrote:
| GrapheneOS
| res0nat0r wrote:
| I would just love a good Android based phone with a Blackberry
| style keyboard. I know there are a couple out there, but
| something from a current large manufacturer would be nice.
| nubinetwork wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36405014
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36600014
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36600211
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36600709
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36608312
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36634318
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36635666
| nologic01 wrote:
| Got a fairphone 4 for somenody I care about and will likely get
| one for myself when my current unrepairable, glued-battery piece
| of e-waste becomes unusable.
|
| I wish they would come preinstalled with something like kde
| plasma mobile though. I will never warm to android, no matter how
| "degoogled" it might become. There is something about its
| architecture that seems freakish. Like the entire digital
| universe that was created in the last decades.
| lawn wrote:
| I've been using my Fairphone 4 for around a year or so and it's
| been great.
|
| An easily removable battery is a godsend and the phone is
| surprisingly durable as I've been dropping it a lot (me clumsy).
|
| I haven't encountered any issue and the one complaint I have is
| the lack of 3.5 jack. It was quite hard to find a USB converter
| that worked and having to use an adapter is really annoying.
|
| Still if this one breaks I can repair it and I would even buy a
| new one if I had to.
| ctenb wrote:
| I bought a converter too, but it just didnt work at all! Which
| adapter worked for you?
| lawn wrote:
| I don't remember the one I got, but I looked it up in a list.
| Maybe this was the list?
|
| https://forum.fairphone.com/t/fp4-list-of-usb-c-
| to-3-5-audio...
|
| There's also an adapter on the official site that they say
| should work (but I haven't tried it):
| https://shop.fairphone.com/shop/usb-c-to-mini-audio-jack-
| ada...
| malf wrote:
| SO had a fairphone. Broke screen. Turned out the screen
| replacement module was vaporware.
| progval wrote:
| Was it out of stock? Non-functional?
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